TACLOBAN, Philippines >> A run-down, single-story
building with filthy floors at Tacloban's ruined airport has become the
area's main medical center for victims of last week's powerful typhoon.
It has little medicine, virtually no facilities and very few doctors.

What it is not short of are patients.

Hundreds
of injured people, pregnant women, children and the elderly have poured
into the squat, white building behind the control tower since Typhoon
Haiyan ravaged the eastern Philippines on Friday, killing thousands.
Doctors who have been dealing with cuts, fractures and pregnancy'
complications said Wednesday (Tuesday in Hawaii) they soon expect to be treating more
serious problems such as pneumonia, dehydration, diarrhea and
infections.

The medical woes add to the daunting tasks for
authorities, including dealing with looters and clearing the bottlenecks
holding up thousands of tons of aid material from coming in.

"The
priority has got to be, let's get the food in, let's get the water in.
We got a lot more come in today, But even that won't be enough, We
really need to scale up operation in an ongoing basis," U.N.
humanitarian chief Valerie Amos told reporters after touring Talcoban,
the capital of Leyte province. Her office has released $25 million in
emergency relief fund, accounting for a chunk of the millions of dollars
pledged by countries around the world.

While the cogs of what
promises to be a massive international aid effort are beginning to turn,
they are not quick enough for the 600,000 people displaced, many of
them homeless, hungry and thirsty.

With the Tacloban airport
battered and roads made impassable by debris, very little aid has
arrived in the city. Most of it is stuck in Manila and the nearby
airport of Cebu, a 45-minute flight away.

Many among the desperate
residents have resorted to raiding for food. Mobs overran a rice
warehouse on Leyte, collapsing a wall that killed eight people.
Thousands of sacks of the grain were carted off. Also Wednesday,
security forces exchanged gunfire with an armed gang.

Tacloban
Mayor Alfred Romualdez urged residents to flee the city because local
authorities were having trouble providing food and water and maintaining
order, The New York Times reported. He said the city desperately needed
trucks to distribute relief shipments accumulating at the airport as
well as equipment to pull decaying corpses from the rubble.

Despite those incidents, police said the situation was improving.

"We
have restored order," said Carmelo Espina Valmoria, director of the
Philippine National Police special action force. "There has been looting
for the last three days, but the situation has stabilized."

With
the local police force unable to operate -- most were victims -- the
government rushed thousands of soldiers and 600 policemen from other
parts of the country. The security forces, including army engineers, are
helping clear roads and remove the dead, many of them on roadsides. A 6
p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew was in place.

"There's a lot of dead bodies
outside. There's no water, no food," said Dr. Victoriano Sambale, one
of the dozen medical staff tending to thousands of people at the airport
clinic. Until Wednesday, there was no anesthetic, so open wounds had to
be stitched without it.

"Patients had to endure the pain," Sambale said. Suddenly he is summoned -- another pregnant woman had shown up.

Clutching
her swollen belly, 26-year-old Reve Rose was writhing in agony while
rolling on her side on a wooden bench as her nervous husband looked on.
Her first child was not due until around Christmas but she feared she is
in labor already. Sambale felt her belly and tried to calm her down,
certain it was just a panic attack.

"I am nervous, sad," she said. "The house is lost. Everything is gone."

The
air inside the clinic was fetid. Babies screamed and despondent elderly
patients sat in chairs, eating dry crackers. One woman nursed her
newborn, signing a lullaby. Intravenous drip bags hung from nails driven
into the walls and doorjambs.

Thelma Superable, 74, was vomited
and needed emergency dialysis. She, her 51-year-old son, Danny
Superable, and his young son have made their way to the clinic from
their home, 37 kilometers (20 miles) away, by walking and hitching
rides. By the time they reached the clinic, they were down to one bottle
-- with an inch of water left in it. "I am trembling because I am
hungry," Danny Superable said. "It's survival of the fittest."

Since
the storm, people have broken into homes, malls and garages, where they
have stripped the shelves of food, water and other goods. Authorities
have struggled to stop the looting. There have been unconfirmed reports
of armed gangs of robbers operating in a systematic manner.

The
death toll rose to 2,344, according a national tally kept by the
disaster agency. That figure is expected to rise, perhaps significantly,
when accurate information is collected from the whole disaster zone,
which spreads over a wide swath of the eastern and central Philippines
but appears to be concentrated on two main islands -- Leyte and Samar.

The
congressman for Eastern Samar province, a coastal region that bore the
full force of the storm, said 211 people had been killed there and 45
were missing.

"The situation there was horrible," Ben Evardone
told a local TV station. "Some communities disappeared, entire villages
were wiped out. They were shouting 'food, food, food!' when they saw
me."

The government says planes, ships and trucks were all on
their way, loaded with generators, water purifying kits and emergency
lights -- vital equipment to sustain a major relief mission. Airports
were reopening in the region, and the U.S. military said it was
installing equipment to allow the damaged Tacloban aiport to operate
24-7.

A Norwegian ship carrying supplies left from Manila, while
an Australian air force transport plane carrying a medical team took off
from Canberra. British and U.S. navy vessels are also en route.

U.S.
Brig Gen. Paul Kennedy promised a response akin to the widely praised
U.S. military one after the 2004 Asian tsunami, when fleets of
helicopters dropped water and food to hundreds of isolated communities.

"You
are not just going to see Marines and a few planes and some
helicopters," Kennedy said. "You will see the entire Pacific Command
respond to this crisis."

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